Browsing by Author "Jaftha, Tamzine"

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    “Times and seasons”: childhood and the child’s body in selected works of William Wordsworth and Olive Schreiner
    (Univeristy of the Western Cape, 2024) Jaftha, Tamzine
    Romanticism’s emergence in the late eighteenth century was rooted in a critical conversation and counter with the structured ideals of the Enlightenment preceding it. In literature, the Romantic movement sought to reconnect to and celebrate the beauty of nature, encouraged individualism, the expression of emotion and the inner self. Along with this, Romanticism emphasised the importance of preserving and appreciating the natural environment and that the human’s reconnection to nature will evoke and renew their sense of wonder of self and the self in nature. William Wordsworth became a well-known revered literary voice as a Romantic poet in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as his works greatly reflected the tenets of the time. Along with other British Romantic canon writers such as Samuel Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, William Blake and John Keats, Wordsworth valorised the Imagination, human beings’ connection with the natural environment, aesthetic sensibility and the landscape. In some of his work he particularly focuses on the child and childhood as symbols of purity and innocence to portray the themes of nostalgia, memory and a sentimental attachment to childhood as a kind of utopia. The portrayal of the child and childhood in his works signified a way of using memory and the Imagination to reconnect to nature as the Divine. During the Victorian period, which succeeds Romanticism, Olive Schreiner emerged as an author in South Africa during the mid-nineteenth century, her works portraying New Woman ideals inherited from Romanticism valorising individual freedom found in the child’s communion with nature in The Story of an African Farm (1883). It is also the argument of this thesis that Schreiner is an heiress of Romanticism, read palpably and subtly in her first published novel that both endorses and departs from both Romanticism and Victorian ideals in interesting ways.